Let's not talk about sex – why passion is waning in British books

Martin Amis says literary sex is impossible, Hilary Mantel prefers to leave things to the imagination ... but Tony Blair went for it hell for leather and got nominated for a Bad Sex award. So are some things best left unsaid?

'It's very easy to write a sex scene where everything goes wrong,' says novelist Hilary Mantel. 'But it's very hard to write about good sex.' Photograph: Sodapix/Rex Features

'What was really striking, and we talked about it all the time in the meetings, was how little sex there was," says biographer Frances Wilson, one of this year's Booker prize judges.

With Howard Jacobson taking the £50,000 award on Tuesday for The Finkler Question, the comic novel may finally have earned its moment in the limelight. But literary sex appears to be on the way out. "I thought I was going to have to steel myself to read a lot of sex stuff," says the chairman of judges, Andrew Motion, "and about halfway through I realised that it wasn't happening."

Instead there were loads of drugs. "Rather than one thing led to another in the bedroom it was one thing led to another in the bathroom," Wilson says.

Motion was being "semi-facetious" when he suggested earlier in the year that writers had been scared off writing about sex by the Literary Review's Bad Sex award. Now, with the Booker done and the Bad Sex prize coming up next month, he says: "It seems a completely reasonable thing to suppose that it has put people off.

Even though everyone puts a brave face on it, actually [if you were nominated] you'd feel, 'Oh dear'." One recently published author, who asked to remain anonymous, admitted as much, saying that if his novel were nominated he would feel "humiliated and unhappy" – though he would do his best to hide it.

How Tony Blair will take the news of his possible nomination is anyone's guess. Literary Review's editor, Nancy Sladek, told me earlier in the week that despite his memoir A Journey having been suggested by several readers, non-fiction it is not eligible for the award (see extract, below).

But by last night, following newspaper coverage, she had revised her position to say that the judges are now "considering it" on grounds of popular demand.

Last weekend Martin Amis told a literary festival audience that it's "impossible" for a novelist to write about real, as opposed to pornographic, sex anyway. "Sex is irreducibly personal, therefore not universal," he later tells me.

"It's not that surprising. Of all human activities this is the one that peoples the world. With that tonnage of emotion on it, if there is going to be one thing you can't write about then that would be it. It's a bit like why it's so difficult to write about dreams."

So is it true that there is less sex in novels than there used to be? Are writers too scared of being laughed at? Or have they decided, like Amis, that it doesn't work in any case?

For Literary Review magazine, such a change would signal the success of a campaign they have been waging since the Bad Sex award was launched by Auberon Waugh and Rhoda Koenig in 1993.

The prize, awarded at a posh London party, is widely regarded as a giggle, and no one could begrudge the magazine the publicity it generates. But its stated intention, "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it," manages to be both prurient and prudish at the same time.

Sladek says it is all "supposed to be lighthearted, not supposed to humiliate", but she is adamant sex in books "just doesn't work, I don't think there are any cases where it works".

And she has little time for those who fail to see the joke, accusing Sebastian Faulks, who declined to pick up his award for Charlotte Gray in 1998, of a "sense of humour failure".

Few writers take Sladek's hard line that sex should never be described. Amis makes an exception for Lolita, "because it's such an outlandish and extreme version of the sexual act that somehow gets the hilarity and the horror, without any gross descriptions, and also pays the price morally in a very complicated and satisfying way".

But plenty of authors share the view that writing about sex is difficult, and presents particular challenges – and that sex that might be described as ordinary, or even enjoyable, is hardest of all.

"One happy, healthy sexual relationship in the whole longlist and shortlist" is how Wilson sums up this year's Booker nominees, "Parrot [in Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America] adores his woman and they have fantastically happy sex." Apart from that it was emptiness, weirdness, and in Andrea Levy's The Long Song, set on a slave plantation, "rape after rape after rape".

In The Finkler Question, Julian Treslove's sex life is, in keeping with the rest of the novel, both comic and sad. "Much of the time she lay facing away from Treslove, working on his penis with her hand behind her back, as though fastening a complicated brassiere, or struggling with a jar that wouldn't open," is how Jacobson describes his encounter with Finkler's wife.

"It's very easy to write a sex scene where everything goes wrong, you can do it in a funny away or in a way that's absolutely heartbreaking, but it's very hard to write about good sex," says Hilary Mantel, who won last year's Booker for her historical tour de force Wolf Hall.

"In good sex the individual personality kind of gets lost, people transcend themselves in a way. In bad sex people become hyper-aware of their bodies, the isolation of their bodies, of shame and humiliation. It's really in the same way that unhappiness is easier to describe than happiness. Good sex and happiness are not a story, the story occurs when things go wrong."

What goes on in the bedroom between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is the crux of Wolf Hall. "The whole thing turns on a woman's body and what it can do," Mantel says. "It's the pivot of this bit of English history really, it's the one vital issue that Henry needs his heir and only a woman can manage it."

But while she depicts the court as fixated on Boleyn and the erotic hold she has over the already married king, and the courtiers agog with speculation as to what they get up to, Mantel chose not to describe the moment of the conception of the future Queen Elizabeth I directly.

"I tend to think what is explicit is often ineffective, that you can do more by hints and implication. As with describing anything, the trick is to get the reader doing the work. The space between the lines, that's where the reading experience takes place. If you can make your reader's imagination work, that is much more powerful than saying, he put his hand here and she put her hand there. That just makes the reader think, are these people contortionists and could I get into that position?"

While Motion thinks there is something strange about the "air of reticence and silence" surrounding sex in contemporary fiction, he agrees that sometimes letting the characters go into the bedroom on their own and closing the door "might actually be the better thing to do".

Plenty of writers take the opposite view, arguing that it is in the act of having sex that characters reveal themselves most fully.

Adam Thirlwell, whose debut novel, Politics, was a startlingly explicit examination of bedroom manners, believes we are living through a "very conservative era" in literary terms.

He believes novelists should push the boundaries both of form and content, following in the footsteps of writers such as DH Lawrence whose publisher Penguin was prosecuted exactly 50 years ago, under obscenity laws, for attempting to publish – 30 years after the author's death – his groundbreakingly frank novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

He points out that there is no such thing in a novel as a "scene", and that even by thinking in terms of "sex scenes", both readers and writers are showing the influence of cinema, in which sex is depicted according to a narrow vocabulary bearing the taint of pornography, which is all about visual stimulation and bears little relationship to the questions about language, and the representation of interiority, that novelists should be worrying about.

Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas goes further, saying that the attacks by some critics on his novel The Slap as being vulgar or pornographic "bemuse me as they seem to ignore how much of sexual imagination, particularly male sexual imagination, is now experienced through pornography itself.

We all know that the new media technologies have caused an undeniable mainstreaming of the pornographic experience but there is a tendency, particularly in the English novel, to want to keep things nice, to identify the pornography as other, as abject, as belonging to an underclass. This is bourgeois bullshit."

Colm Toibin, who has written about gay sex in several novels, says the heterosexual sex scene in his most recent novel Brooklyn, when the heroine Eilis loses her virginity to her American boyfriend, was essential to the book: "I went to a friend who's a girl and asked her, 'What's it like to have sex for the first time, if you're Irish – so you're modest, and it's the 1950s – so you've never seen it in a film?' I listened carefully to what she said, and I put it in the book. It was an important element, the detail was richly memorable for the person, it had to be in the book."

He adds: "It's a question of writing. If you give in to any simile, any metaphor, any set of feelings, any flowery language, the modern reader's irony will come to the fore. It's almost how you would describe driving – very, very specific and exact." Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, he suggests, is the perfect example. "There isn't one single piece of language that describes anything other than what occurred."

He says that for gay writers, in particular, finding a way of writing directly about sexual experiences was essential, and the novels of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst were "terribly important for gay people, the simple problem is that we had no images of ourselves".

"I think if it comes up, don't duck it," says Rowan Somerville, whose novel The Shape of Her, about a man with sexual problems stemming from abuse in his past, was published this summer.

"Why shouldn't you talk about sex? Some people find it really boring, I like a really good raunchy bit in a book." He says the Bad Sex award reminds him of a bunch of sniggering sixth-formers in the back of the class. "There's a kind of English notion of sexuality that I wish we could get away from, it's Benny Hill, it's page 3." Tsiolkas, who along with Craig Raine and Blair is a contender for this year's award, is similarly scathing: "I have no idea who is behind the Literary Review's Bad Sex awards and I may be making an awful assumption but I think their sexual highlight was probably jerking each other off at Eton."

Thirlwell regrets that few writers nowadays, particularly in Britain, seem prepared to risk exhibiting the sheer horniness of a John Updike or a Philip Roth. (Updike, incidentally, was given a lifetime achievement award by the Literary Review.)

But he doubts the magazine is responsible for this new inhibition: "I can't believe that any decent novelist is sitting there worrying about the Bad Sex award." He suggests that if writers have become more self-conscious about sex in recent years, it is more to do with broader changes in the way that literature is marketed and sold, and in particular the greater degree of scrutiny that writers are expected to undergo at the hands of readers (at book signings and festivals), and journalists (in all manner of interviews).

He believes novelists today are "much more exposed" than the novelists of 30 years ago, and that the difficulties of writing about sex throw up "more general problems about literature and the relationship the reader has to the writer".

In the end it seems the biggest difficulty with sex in books, as with sex in real life, may be one of embarrassment. "In fiction you're very rarely showing off your deep private fantasies," Thirlwell says, "but over 300 pages you can't help but show what intrigues you, so there is a self-exposure to the novel."

He believes this has become a real problem for modern, media-savvy novelists, who must somehow find a way to continue concentrating on whatever it is that interests them without feeling shy or ashamed about it. Tsiolkas agrees, arguing that the danger and experiment of 20th-century writers such as Henry Miller and Anais Nin has been replaced by a submission to comfort.

"There are a million ways of writing about sex," he says. "The only way that you can't write about it is by being scared."

Tony Blair follows his instincts

Cherie was an incredible strength during those months. She knew her own life was about to change and for her it was equally frightening, in some ways even more so [...]

However, that night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel that what I was about to do was right. I had no doubt that I had to go for it, but I needed the reassurance and, above all, the emotional ballast.

In many ways, I am very emotionally self-sufficient; in some ways, too much so. I make emotional commitment because it comes naturally to me. But I fear it also; fear the loss of control and the fact that the consequences of caring can be painful; fear the dependence; perhaps fear learning the lesson, from love that goes wrong, that human nature is frail and unreliable after all.

On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength, I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power and resilience to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined, in roughly equal quantities.